A little more than a month after the September 11 attacks, the Italian intelligence service handed over to the CIA’s station in Rome a sheaf of documents that had been kicking around intelligence circles for a couple of years. They involved a visit by Iraqi officials to the African country of Niger, an impoverished nation planted atop some of the finest uranium in the world. The Italians passed the same documents to British and French intelligence, as well.
One of the documents was a letter, written in French, in which the president of Niger, Mamadou Tandja, offered to sell Saddam Hussein five hundred tons a year of uranium “yellowcake,” suitable, if enriched, for use in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. This letter was why the CIA dispatched a former diplomat named Joseph Wilson to Niger in February 2002. Wilson reported back that there seemed to be no basis for the story. Nevertheless, the letter later became the basis of the famous “sixteen words”—“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa”—in George W. Bush’s prewar 2003 State of the Union speech. Watching the speech today, it is striking how Bush reads the last two of those sixteen words. He drops his voice to a lower register. He speaks … very … slowly. All that’s missing are some ominous minor chords from a movie-house pipe organ. There seem to be bats hanging on every syllable. The war was launched three months later.
“Remember,” Ford says, “the argument for years was whether or not they had reconstituted their nuclear program. That was the single most important issue and, when that changed, the time line changed. All of a sudden, you say they’ve reconstituted their nuclear weapons program, not only do they have chemical and biological weapons, but the clock has started on when they’re going to have nuclear weapons and, if we don’t do something, they are going to build one. But, before that, if they’re not reconstituting their nuclear program, you can’t argue that you need to go in there and kick their ass.”
In July 2002 Wilson published an op-ed in the New York Times reiterating what he’d earlier told the CIA—that, as far as he could determine, the transaction between Niger and Iraq was the purest moonshine. In retaliation, the White House political apparatus leaked the name of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, who was a covert CIA operative working on issues of nuclear proliferation, to a series of Washington journalists. A lengthy investigation ensued, concluding with the conviction of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby for perjury. His sentence was then commuted by President Bush. His trial opened a window into the novelization of the process by which Idiot America had taken itself to war.
And the letter that helped start the war was a clumsy, obvious fake. Skeptics with a firsthand knowledge of Niger—such as Wilson—found the whole transaction as described in the letter implausible. An international consortium strictly monitored Niger’s uranium production. There was simply no way to move five hundred tons of uranium a year around the country discreetly. It would tie up the entire nation’s trucking capacity, and shipping these loads down the rudimentary roadways from the mines to the port cities would paralyze the country’s traffic. It was probably the most consequential forgery since the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and people all over the United States government, like Carl Ford, knew it.
“This one was not a hard one,” Ford explains. “This was one of those easy cases. You have a fragment of information that is accompanied by a couple of older fragments, and all it suggests is that somebody from Iraq may have talked to the Nigerien government about buying some yellowcake. The reports don’t say they did. They don’t say exactly when or how, and that, alone, for a long time, at least through the NIE [in 2002], became the basis for people—everybody; CIA, DIA—saying they are in fact buying yellowcake from Africa.”
The narrative had triumphed. Reality had been richly novelized with details that people made up to fill in the inconvenient gaps in the actual story. A forgery had been used to reinforce untruth and wishful thinking, and the people selling it had been able to do so with full confidence that the people they were taking to war by and large hadn’t been paying attention to their government closely enough over the previous two years. Shell-shocked, the country had put itself on automatic pilot and hadn’t remembered to turn the equipment off in time. The crash came, and it was bloody and ongoing.
“Remember,” Ford muses, “this was a time in which people were doing and saying things in response to 9/11 that not only seemed to me at the time to be outrageous, but were clearly the majority positions. My argument isn’t that there weren’t substantive issues. What bothered me was the rationale that we know better than Congress, that we know better than the American people. The problem is that it takes leaders who are willing to say, ‘This is going to be painful, folks, but we got a crisis here between our Constitution and the threat and we’ve got to work together to find a solution to it.’ I have great faith that the American people can learn. They do believe in our Constitution and they’ll fight to keep it.”
Carl Ford left government and now works in one of those Washington offices just out of the gravitational sphere of the official city. The same dynamic that enabled a clumsy forgery to remain part of a casus belli was at work throughout the war and everything that came after it. The endless occupation. Secret prisons. Torture. All of it came as reflex, unthinking and automatic.
IN Imperial Life in the Emerald City, his account of the first two years of the American occupation of Iraq, Rajiv Chandrasekaran describes the hiring process by which young Americans—undeniably brave and in many cases admirably idealistic—were hired to go to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the governing body cobbled together for the purpose of bringing some semblance of order to the postwar chaos. According to Chandrasekaran, applicants were vetted on, among other things, the fervor of their opposition to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that had legalized abortion years before most of them had been born. Qualified people in fields like the production of electricity were passed over in favor of the offspring of Republican campaign contributors. Prospective employees were treated during their interview process to lengthy grilling as to their opinions on capital punishment and the Bush domestic agenda—which is to say, the Bush domestic agenda for the United States, not for Iraq. When, in desperation, the CPA sent an actual headhunter back to Washington to get control of the process, the civilian leadership tried to have the man thrown out of the Pentagon. Thus was the essential dynamic of the Hardball green room grafted onto a massive foreign policy experiment in the most volatile part of the world, the Marx Brothers working from a script by Graham Greene.
In retrospect, some of what was said during the run-up to the war about the postwar period in Iraq sounds fantastical. Paul Wolfowitz was “reasonably certain” that the U.S. troops would be “greeted as liberators,” and that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction. Richard Cheney expected “candy and flowers” to be tossed from every balcony from Mosul to Basra. The looting of priceless antiquities from the Baghdad museum was greeted with “Stuff happens” by Donald Rumsfeld, channeling every teenager who ever cracked up the family sedan. The looting of tons of ammunition, which would have more serious immediate consequences, was greeted in much the same way. The liberation of Iraq by force, it was said, would set off a wildfire of democratization that would remake the Middle East as it had Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It was as though the people in charge of the enterprise went into Iraq expecting to be rescued from the consequences of their own decisions by the sword of Gilgamesh, or the timely intervention of Baal.
And, just as was the case with the intelligence that led to the war in the first place, experts within the government who were dubious about the prospects of a short, easy occupation were ignored, marginalized, or, in several cases, attacked and forced to resign. One of those people was David Phillips, a consultant who once headed up what was called the Future of Iraq Project for the State Department, a program that involved seventeen federal agencies. It sp
ent $5 million and it developed plans for everything from rural electrification to political reconciliation.
Perhaps its most important element was the Democratic Principles Working Group, which took upon itself the considerable task of devising a workable plan for democratic reforms on a country that had been cobbled together in the aftermath of World War I to include various ethnic and religious sects, most of whom did not like one another. Phillips was deeply involved in that particular element of the project.
Phillips was not a softhearted bureaucrat. He was a hard-headed realist who earlier had helped reconstruct the Balkans after that region had spent a decade tearing itself apart in a spasm of genocidal lunacy. Phillips was a partisan of the Kurds, in the northern part of Iraq. The United States had sold this embattled people down the river at least twice over the past thirty years; their history is the living definition of being only a pawn in the game. Phillips believed in regime change in Iraq and, if military action was absolutely necessary to achieve it, he would support that, too.
Phillips’s project was torn apart largely through infighting between the State Department and those elements elsewhere in the government—particularly in the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the Office of the Vice President—who were trying to sell the country on the war.
“I had an evolving sense that we were being set aside,” Phillips says. “It was clear that they were approaching this work from a different ideological perspective than were the professionals at State that I was in touch with, and that they were much more interested in lining up Iraqis so they could present a united front to American public opinion as opposed to working substantively through the kind of problems that had to be addressed.” Gradually, but inexorably, Phillips says, the center of gravity for the reconstruction of Iraq shifted away from the State Department and toward a group of people engaged in what seemed to Phillips to be magical thinking.
“They were engaged in a discussion, actively engaged,” he says. “But they wanted the discussion to reach conclusions that were consistent with their prejudgment, which was that the Iraqis were desperate to be liberated, the Iraqi exiles could be parachuted in, that the U.S. could decapitate the Ba’athist hierarchy, install the exiles, and be out of Iraq in ninety days. Because the administration was dominated by ideologues, ideology trumped pragmatism.”
Phillips knew what he knew. He just didn’t believe what the ideologues believed. “You can just as easily have a faith-based, or ideologically driven, policy,” he says. “You start with the presumption that you already know the answer prior to asking the question. When information surfaces that contradicts your firmly entrenched views, you dismantle the institution that brought you the information.
“We went in blindfolded and believed our own propaganda. We were going to get out in ninety days, spend $1.9 billion in the short term, and Iraqi oil was going to pay for the rest. Now we’re deep in the hole, and people are asking questions about how we got there. It’s delusional, allowing delusions to be the basis of policymaking. Once you’ve told the big lie, you have to substantiate it with a sequence of lies that’s repeated. You can’t fix a policy if you don’t believe that it’s broken.”
Frustrated that all his work had been ignored—in April 2003, when American ambassador L. Paul Bremer III suspended the handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis, the members of Phillips’s Democratic Principles Working Group were infuriated at what they saw as a betrayal—Phillips resigned in protest on September 11, 2003. He did not, however, go quietly. He gave speeches and appeared on television. He wrote a book, Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco. He found himself tangled in the thickets of deception that still surrounded the war and its aftermath, and in the complete inadequacy of those institutions whose job it was to cut through them. Once, when he was consulting for NBC News, a young producer asked him to come on television to comment on something Hans Blix was going to say to the UN Security Council. Blix was speaking at five P.M. They wanted Phillips on the air at four.
“They said, ‘Just assume, guess what he’ll say, and comment upon it,’” Phillips reports. “I told him that I couldn’t comment on a statement that hadn’t been made yet.”
IN Falls Church, deep in the Virginia countryside outside Washington, parkways wind gently between the gleaming offices set back among the trees. Consultants work here, ex-military types who wear their expensive suits like uniforms. Other people still in uniform come out to meet with them, jamming the food court of a Marriott hotel. One man in fatigues eats a salad holding a fork in his prosthetic hand. A soft rain mottles the glass of the windows.
Anthony Zinni works in one of the quiet office towers. He is a security consultant, one of the non-uniformed men with whom the uniformed men come to do business. But he is still a soldier, a Marine, built like a bullet, with the unwavering gaze that makes it look as though he sees everything through a gun-sight. For ten years, Zinni was the general in charge of keeping Saddam Hussein in a box. He is now an outcast in the circles within which he once worked. He’s an outcast because the strategy that he helped create was abandoned and Zinni objected, forcefully. He objected to the war and he objected to what he believed was the meretricious grounds on which the war was launched. He is an outcast mostly because he was right.
“We value theory over experience,” he says. “We’ve come to that. That’s relatively new. This town is full of bright young twenty- to thirty-something Ph.D.s who all have a new strategy, a new theory that fits over a page and a half about how the world should be run. There’s no balance between theorist and practitioner anymore. We like short, snappy, quick answers to things, and the world is much more complex.
“You know, the most boring thing you could imagine is a politician standing up and giving a complex, strategic view of the world. Which is necessary, but it’s soon put off. We judge the political debates by who has the snappiest little phrase that can be put out there. We live in a world of spin. So we don’t look at reality and truth.”
Zinni got smacked in the face with this revelation one day in August 2002. He was in Nashville, attending the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, at which he was to be given an award. He’d recently retired after thirty-five years in the Marines, in no small part because his expertise had been marginalized in the new administration, which he’d supported during the 2000 campaign.
The keynote speaker at the VFW convention was Vice President Dick Cheney. In his speech, Cheney said, flatly, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction…. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” It was a call for war. Sitting behind Cheney on the platform, Zinni was gobsmacked.
“I said, ‘You have to be kidding me. Where is that coming from?’” he says. “The situation wasn’t even anything remotely like that. I’m listening to this case for war based on faulty or—and I’m being kind—embellished intelligence.
“I couldn’t believe they were doing this. And it became clear to me that the neocons were selling this idea that had been from the mid-nineties—some of them even called it ‘creative destabilization’—that you go in and do something like this and Iraq’s the right place, and you’re going to light the fire of democracy in the Middle East and change the equation. All of us who knew that area and had been out there said, ‘You’re going to light a fire, all right, but it’s not going to be one of democracy and stabilization. It’s going to be destabilizing and destructive. You do not understand the forces you were about to unleash.’”
Zinni’s opposition was not simply geopolitical. He saw with a grunt’s eye view what the American soldiers were going to face in Iraq. “We don’t appreciate the lessons of history,” Zinni says. “There’s a difference between failures based on arrogance and incompetence and ignorance, and mistakes that everybody makes in the course of very involved and complex undertakings like this one.”
Zi
nni had one last chance to make his case. He was called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 2003. Four months earlier, Congress had given the president the authority to use military force against Iraq, and Bush had made it quite plain that he planned to do so. Having already surrendered its war powers, Congress was putting on something of a bipartisan dumb show. Administration officials were stupefyingly vague about plans for dealing with the problems of postwar Iraq, and Zinni knew why: They didn’t have any plans, because some of them didn’t really care. He saw in these officials not merely a lack of expertise, but a contempt for those who had it.
Zinni’s expertise was in devising ways to keep as many soldiers as possible from getting killed in pursuit of a specific objective. He gently chided the committee for its lack of curiosity and its passive acceptance of the gruel it was being fed. He continued to oppose the war in public appearances, but the war came anyway, because nobody who could have stopped it stood up and tried.
That was what stayed with Anthony Zinni as the war was launched, and Saddam fell, and Iraq exploded, as more than three thousand Americans died over four years during which everything he thought would happen did happen, over and over again. The country had wandered into this war, eyes half closed, stunned and shocked and too willingly sold. The people had left the country on automatic pilot too long to pull out of the crash.
“The problem comes on this sort of ideological notion that’s presented, and it discounts all those with experience in the region, despite what they’re saying. There’s no hearing for the other side. As a matter of fact, what it becomes is for those of us who voiced our concerns to be called traitors. You were losing this war from the day you crossed the line of departure…. Taking down the regime was not a difficult task. Doing it with too few troops, not having a plan for reconstruction, doomed you from the start.
Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Page 23
